It's completely dependent on the languages you are already familiar with. In Germany, I knew a Dutch speaker who found speaking German almost as easy as speaking his native language, whereas English was considerably more difficult for him. I imagine a native speaker of Chinese would find English easier than Spanish because the grammar is more similar. And so forth. It's impossible to make a definitive list.

I have so little experience with languages that I can't give a good answer for this question.

Well, how linguoboy said, if language to be studied is similar to the mother tongue of the student, so, in theory, the learning will be more easy.

A factor must be considered, the clarity of the grammar of the language, I learned esperanto in six months because its grammar is regular; some people says that the formal indonesian can be learned in six months too because its grammar is very regular.

Makinary wrote:A factor must be considered, the clarity of the grammar of the language, I learned esperanto in six months because its grammar is regular; some people says that the formal indonesian can be learned in six months too because its grammar is very regular.

I think an important factor in both cases is that the number of L2 speakers far outnumbers the number of L1 speakers (by several orders of magnitude in the case of Esperanto and by a factor of about 6:1 in the case of Indonesian). That provides a break on the amount of idiomaticity that can creep in.

Too many factors go into what makes a language easy or hard for any given person. There simply isn't an objectively easiest or hardest language.

As a native English speaker: I studied French for 8 years, up to the first year of my uni course. I dropped it in favour of Russian which I had at that point been learning for a year and had actually failed one of my first year modules and was having to retake it.

However, Russian from the start made much, much more sense to me, and I knew that it would be harder to actually improve my French (having just spent a year getting more and more confused) than it would be to get up to speed with Russian.

I went on to get a 2-1 in Russian, despite struggling with illness throughout my uni career. Clearly, a good move!

For me, Russian made a hundred times more sense than French, and it was therefore "easier" for me, despite the different alphabet, despite never having used cases before, despite aspect (yikes) and verbs of motion (double yikes), despite that I had been learning French for seven years before I had ever even seen a word written in the language.

English tends to be easy to get by in/be understood, it's not especially easy to be truly fluent and nuanced, and we also have an enormous vocabulary. I've met dozens of people from all over the world who would say they speak English, and I can think of literally only one whose English was really as fluent and correct as she thought it was!

When I learned Croatian, that was coming off a year being in Russia, so it seemed very easy to me. Arabic I found incredibly difficult to teach myself even a little: Hebrew I've made quite a bit of progress, although they're very closely related languages.

Even with constructed languages, a person's mother tongue will influence how easy or hard they find it. I'm finding Esperanto fairly user friendly, but then, it's written in a script I've been using for thirty years, its vocab and grammar are drawn largely from languages I've studied to some degree, and I'm comparing it directly to my other most recent attempt, Hebrew! Given the circumstances, it's not surprising I'd peg it as being relatively easy.

Languages which came most naturally to me? Russian, Croatian, Esperanto. But those are very specific to me, I don't think those languages are easy per se, that others would have the same experience, or even that it's possible to judge any given language as objectively easier or harder than other.

Fluent: English, rusty РусскийLearning: עברית, EsperantoPreviously learned/would like to brush up: HrvatskiBits and pieces of various other languages!

I don't think there's such thing as an easy language. I was having a conversation about languages the other day with my friends and they said that Japanese and Korean are very easy to learn. I disagreed and we had an argument. When I told my Korean roommate about it, she said that she doesn't think Korean is easy at all even though she's Korean. Not to mention, Korean and Japanese are among the most difficult languages to learn in the world.

In my opinion, the easiest language to learn is my mother tongue. All other languages are difficult.